Excerpt from Kyle Hailey's blog:
Delphix connects to the MySQL database on production and syncs all the data changes onto Delphix providing a timeline (down to second) of changes. These versions of the database can be provisioned out to a target host via what is called “thin cloning”. When a thin clone is made, data is not moved or changed. Instead we just make an image of the data at the point in time available to the database instance. The data is mounted over NFS or iSCSI. The only thing that gets stored in these thin clones are changes made to the thin clone and those changes are only visible to the clone that made the changes. This architecture provides two things- Backups down to the second of production for a multiple weeks generally stored in less than the size of the original database thanks to compression and deduplication and accessible in a matter of minutes.
- Thin clones of the data providing as many copies to as many developers as we want for almost free.
Interested in more? Continued
here.